A daughter could not have a Bar Mitzvah, she has a Bat Mitzvah. A minyan is part of a religious service, not a civil right; my question would be why the mother had never converted?
Be that as it may...I'm going to rant.
The previous Iraqi government was murderously repressive of any dissent. But minority religions, if they stayed out of politics, were pretty much left alone; they could have their schools, places of worship, customs. After 12 years of a war that would last weeks, not months or years, after a trillion dollars spent on a war that would pay for itself, after the deaths of thousands of US troops who would be greeted as liberators and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, after mission accomplished and Iraq is free and insurgency in its last throes, now, there is serious religious oppression in Iraq, of all minority religions. And US fundamentalists have been strangely silent although it has been going on for years. It's those heathens in Amnesty International, of which I am a card carrying member, who have sent out alerts and action items protesting oppression of Iraqi Christians and others.
But it's OK for a bigoted pastor to distress a family in mourning because of Iraq.
Conservative US evangelicals have been all over talk shows crying about how oppressed they are because gay people exist and are getting married and even want to spend hundreds of dollars on wedding cakes. They didn't talk about Iraq. On this board, MarAzul is outraged that gay people say we are gay, OdenRoyLMA2 copies from a creationist web site and claims to have disproven 150 years of science, PapaG/NewsSource starts half a dozen threads daily about the OUTRAGE of the Obama administration, but until today nothing about Iraq's Christians.
But it's OK for a bigoted pastor to distress a family in mourning because of Iraq.
Not that the conservative US evangelicals ignore the rest of the world. They helped write the antigay law in Russia, that makes being gay a crime and supporting gay rights a crime. Gay youth are being regularly beaten and tortured and the videos posted on line but if they report the attacks they get arrested. US evangelicals helped write the "kill the gays" bill in Uganda, later changed to "imprison the gays for life". They said that unless these bills were passed African and Russian Christians would be "oppressed" by gays just like American Christians are. And praised Putin as a fine Christian leader. Meanwhile Iraqi Christians were being murdered and only Amnesty International said anything.
But it's OK for a bigoted pastor to distress a family in mourning because of Iraq.
You hate rape, OdenRoyLMA2? So do I. There are thousands of Central American children seeking refuge in the US who face an enormous risk of rape and murder in their home country. What is your response? Send them back? American women are raped, too. They undergo rape exams that take 3-4 hours and that many women say are worse than the rape, hoping to provide evidence to convict the rapist. Hundreds of thousands of rape kits sit untested due to lack of funds. Last week Senate Republicans blocked a bill to fund testing of rape kits. Did you protest?
Frankly, I don't think OdenRoyLMA2 give a flying fuck about women being raped. I think he just found some web page mocking gay people.
Since OdenRoyLMA2's knowledge is limited to what he can copy/paste, he probably does not know about the origins of the word "***got". It meant bundles of kindling. And in medieval Europe men charged with homsexuality were tied together in bundles and burned to death. They were literally ***gots. Real inconvenient, no? I doubt OdenRoyLMA2 knows where the pink triangle comes from - the badge that was put on gays in Nazi death camps, before they were gassed. Pretty inconvenient? In THIS century in THIS country, "reparative therapy" consists of electric shock to the genitals, forced vomiting, even lobotomy to "cure" gays. Also just an inconvenience. As was/is the castration of gay men and the rape of lesbians. Yes, we privileged gays just suffer a few inconveniences, don't we?
But it's OK for a bigoted pastor to distress a family in mourning because of Iraq.